Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography Part 1

Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography.

by George William Erskine Russell.

I

BEGINNINGS

One look back--as we hurry o'er the plain, Man's years speeding us along-- One look back! From the hollow past again, Youth, come flooding into song!

Tell how once, in the breath of summer air, Winds blew fresher than they blow; Times long hid, with their triumph and their care, Yesterday--many years ago!

E. E. BOWEN.

The wayfarer who crosses Lincoln's Inn Fields perceives in the midst of them a kind of wooden temple, and pa.s.ses by it unmoved. But, if his curiosity tempts him to enter it, he sees, through an aperture in the boarded floor, a slab of stone bearing this inscription:

"On this spot was beheaded William Lord Russell, A lover of const.i.tutional liberty, 21st July, A.D. 1683."[1]

Of the martyr thus temperately eulogized I am the great-great-great-great-grandson, and I agree with The Antiquary, that "it's a shame to the English language that we have not a less clumsy way of expressing a relations.h.i.+p of which we have occasion to think and speak so frequently."

Before we part company with my ill-fated ancestor, let me tell a story bearing on his historical position. When my father was a cornet in the Blues, he invited a brother-officer to spend some of his leave at Woburn Abbey. One day, when the weather was too bad for any kind of sport, the visitor was induced to have a look at the pictures. The Rembrandts, and Cuyps, and Van d.y.k.es and Sir Joshuas bored him to extremity, but accidentally his eye lit on Hayter's famous picture of Lord Russell's trial, and, with a sudden gleam of intelligence, he exclaimed, "Hullo!

What's this? It looks like a trial." My father answered, with modest pride--"It is a trial--the trial of my ancestor, William, Lord Russell."

"Good heavens! my dear fellow--an ancestor of yours tried? What a shocking thing! _I hope he got off._"

So much for our Family Martyr.

In a.n.a.lysing one's nationality, it is natural to regard one's four grand-parents as one's component parts. Tried by this test, I am half an Englishman, one quarter a Highlander, and one quarter a Welshman, for my father's father was wholly English; my father's mother wholly Scotch; my mother's father wholly Welsh; and my mother's mother wholly English. My grandfather, the sixth Duke of Bedford, was born in 1766 and died in 1839. He married, as his second wife, Lady Georgiana Gordon, sister of the last Duke of Gordon, and herself "the last of the Gordons" of the senior line. She died just after I was born, and from her and the "gay Gordons" who preceded her, I derive my name of George. It has always been a comfort to me, when rebuked for ritualistic tendencies, to recall that I am great-great-nephew of that undeniable Protestant, Lord George Gordon, whose icon I daily revere. My grandmother had a numerous family, of whom my father was the third. He was born in Dublin Castle, his father being then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland in the Ministry of "All the Talents." My grandfather had been a political and personal friend of Charles James Fox, and Fox had promised to be G.o.dfather to his next child. But Fox died on the 13th of September, 1806, and my father did not appear till the 10th of February, 1807. Fox's nephew, Henry Lord Holland, took over the sponsors.h.i.+p, and bestowed the names of "Charles James Fox" on the infant Whig, who, as became his father's viceregal state, was christened by the Archbishop of Dublin, with water from a golden bowl.

The life so impressively auspicated lasted till the 29th of June, 1894.

So my father, who remembered an old Highlander who had been out with Prince Charlie in '45, lived to see the close of Mr. Gladstone's fourth Premiers.h.i.+p. He was educated at Rottingdean, at Westminster, where my family had f.a.gged and fought for many generations, and at the University of Edinburgh, where he boarded with that "paltry Pillans," who, according to Byron, "traduced his friend." From Edinburgh he pa.s.sed into the Blues, then commanded by Ernest, Duke of c.u.mberland, and thence into the 52nd Regiment. In 1832 he was returned to the first Reformed Parliament as Whig Member for Bedfords.h.i.+re. He finally retired in 1847, and from that date till 1875 was Sergeant-at-Arms attending the House of Commons. He married in 1834, and had six children, of whom I was the youngest by eight years, being born on the 3rd of February, 1853.[2]

My birthplace (not yet marked with a blue and white medallion) was 16, Mansfield Street; but very soon afterwards the official residences at the Palace of Westminster were finished, and my father took possession of the excellent but rather gloomy house in the Speaker's Court, now (1913) occupied by Sir David Erskine.

Here my clear memories begin. I have indeed some vague impressions of a visit to the widow of my mother's grandfather--Lady Robert Seymour--who died in her ninety-first year when I was two years old; though, as those impressions are chiefly connected with a jam-cupboard, I fancy that they must pertain less to Lady Robert than to her housekeeper. But two memories of my fourth year are perfectly defined. The first is the fire which destroyed Covent Garden Theatre on the 5th of March, 1856. "During the operatic recess, Mr. Gye, the lessee of the Theatre, had sub-let it to one Anderson, a performer of sleight-of-hand feats, and so-called 'Professor.' He brought his short season to a close by an entertainment described as a 'Grand Carnival Complimentary Benefit and Dramatic Gala, to commence on Monday morning, and terminate with a _bal masque_ on Tuesday night.' At 3 on the Wednesday morning, the Professor thought it time to close the orgies. At this moment the gasfitter discovered the fire issuing from the cracks of the ceiling, and, amid the wildest shrieking and confusion, the drunken, panic-stricken masquers rushed to the street. The flames burst through the roof, sending high up into the air columns of fire, which threw into bright reflection every tower and spire within the circuit of the metropolis, brilliantly illuminating the whole fabric of St. Paul's, and throwing a flood of light across Waterloo Bridge, which set out in bold relief the dark outline of the Surrey hills." That "flood of light" was beheld by me, held up in my nurse's arms at a window under "Big Ben," which looks on Westminster Bridge. When in later years I have occasionally stated in a mixed company that I could remember the burning of Covent Garden Theatre, I have noticed a general expression of surprised interest, and have been told, in a tone meant to be kind and complimentary, that my hearers would hardly have thought that my memory went back so far. The explanation has been that these good people had some vague notions of _Rejected Addresses_ floating through their minds, and confounded the burning of Covent Garden Theatre in 1856 with that of Drury Lane Theatre in 1809. Most people have no chronological sense.

Our home was at Woburn, in a house belonging to the Duke of Bedford, but given by my grandfather to my parents for their joint and several lives. My father's duties at the House of Commons kept him in London during the Parliamentary Session, but my mother, who detested London and wors.h.i.+pped her garden, used to return with her family to Woburn, in time to superintend the "bedding-out." My first memory is connected with my home in London; my second with my home in the country, and the rejoicings for the termination of the Crimean War.

Under the date of May 29, 1856, we read in _Annals of Our Time_, "Throughout the Kingdom, the day was marked by a cessation from work, and, during the night, illuminations and fireworks were all but universal." The banners and bands of the triumphal procession which paraded the streets of our little town--scarcely more than a village in dimensions--made as strong an impression on my mind as the conflagration which had startled all London in the previous March.

People who have only known me as a double-dyed Londoner always seem to find a difficulty in believing that I once was a countryman; yet, for the first twenty-five years of my life, I lived almost entirely in the country. "We could never have loved the earth so well, if we had had no childhood in it--if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring, that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the gra.s.s--the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows.... One's delight in an elderberry bush overhanging the confused leaf.a.ge of a hedgerow bank, as a more gladdening sight than the finest cistus or fuchsia spreading itself on the softest undulating turf, is an entirely unjustifiable preference to a Nursery-Gardener. And there is no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory--that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and colour, but the long companion of my existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid."

I had the unspeakable advantage of being reared in close contact with Nature, in an aspect beautiful and wild. My father's house was remarkable for its pretty garden, laid out with the old-fas.h.i.+oned intricacy of pattern, and blazing, even into autumn, with varied colour.

In the midst of it, a large and absolutely symmetrical cedar "spread its dark green layers of shade," and supplied us in summer with a kind of _al fresco_ sitting-room. The background of the garden was formed by the towering trees of Woburn Park; and close by there were great tracts of woodland, which stretch far into Buckinghams.h.i.+re, and have the character and effect of virgin forest.

Having no boy-companions (for my only brother was ten years older than myself), of course I played no games, except croquet. I was brought up in a sporting home, my father being an enthusiastic fox-hunter and a good all-round sportsman. I abhorred shooting, and was badly bored by coursing and fis.h.i.+ng. Indeed, I believe I can say with literal truth that I have never killed anything larger than a wasp, and that only in self-defence. But Woburn is an ideal country for riding, and I spent a good deal of my time on an excellent pony, or more strictly, galloway.

An hour or two with the hounds was the reward of virtue in the schoolroom; and cub-hunting in a woodland country at 7 o'clock on a September morning still remains my most cherished memory of physical enjoyment.

"That things are not as ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and now rest in unvisited tombs." Most true: and among that faithful number I must remember our governess,--Catherine Emily Runciman--who devoted forty years of her life, in one capacity or another, to us and to our parents. She was what boys call "jolly out of school," but rather despotic in it; and, after a few trials of strength, I was emanc.i.p.ated from her control when I was eight. When we were in London for the Session of Parliament, I attended a Day School, kept by two sisters of John Leech, in a curious little cottage, since destroyed, at the bottom of Lower Belgrave Street. Just at the age when, in the ordinary course, I should have gone to a boarding-school, it was discovered that I was physically unfit for the experiment; and then I had a series of tutors at home. To one of these tutors my father wrote--"I must warn you of your pupil's powers of conversation, and tact in leading his teachers into it."

But I was to a great extent self-taught. We had an excellent, though old-fas.h.i.+oned, library, and I spent a great deal of my time in miscellaneous reading. The Waverley Novels gave me my first taste of literary enjoyment, and _Pickwick_ (in the original green covers) came soon after. Shakespeare and _Don Quixote_ were imposed by paternal authority. Jeremy Taylor, Fielding, Smollett, Swift, Dryden, Pope, Byron, Moore, Macaulay, Miss Edgeworth, Bulwer-Lytton, were among my earliest friends, and I had an insatiable thirst for dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Tennyson was the first poet whom I really loved, but I also was fond of Scott's poetry, the _Lays of Ancient Rome_, the _Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers_, and _The Golden Treasury_. Milton, Sh.e.l.ley, Wordsworth, and Matthew Arnold came later, but while I was still a boy.

George Eliot, Thackeray, Ruskin, and Trollope came when I was at Oxford; and I am not sure that Browning ever came. On the whole, I owe my chief enjoyment to Scott, d.i.c.kens, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, and to _Pickwick_ more than to any single book. But I think the keenest thrill of intellectual pleasure which I ever felt pa.s.sed through me when, as a boy at Harrow, I first read Wordsworth's "Daffodils."

Our home, in its outward aspects, was extremely bright and cheerful. We had, as a family, a keen sense of fun, much contempt for convention, and great fluency of speech; and our material surroundings were such as to make life enjoyable. Even as a child, I used to say to myself, when cantering among Scotch firs and rhododendrons, "The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places." A graver element was supplied by a good deal of ill-health, by bereavements, and, in some sense, by our way of religion. My home was intensely Evangelical, and I lived from my earliest days in an atmosphere where the salvation of the individual soul was the supreme and constant concern of life. No form of worldliness entered into it, but it was full of good works, of social service, and of practical labour for the poor. All life was lived, down to its minutest detail, "as ever in the great task-Master's eye." From our very earliest years we were taught the Bible, at first orally; and later on were encouraged to read it, by gifts of handsomely bound copies. I remember that our aids to study were Adam Clarke's Commentary, Nicholl's _Help to Reading the Bible_, and a book called _Light in the Dwelling_. Hymns played a great part in our training. As soon as we could speak, we learned "When rising from the bed of death," and "Beautiful Zion, built above." "Rock of Ages" and "Jesu, Lover of my soul" were soon added. The Church Catechism we were never taught. I was confirmed without learning it. It was said to be too difficult; it really was too sacramental. By way of an easier exercise, I was constrained to learn "The Shorter Catechism of the General a.s.sembly of Divines at Westminster." We had Family Prayers twice every day. My father read a chapter, very much as the fancy took him, or where the Bible opened of itself; and he read without note or comment. I recall a very distinct impression on my infant mind that the pa.s.sages of the Old Testament which were read at prayers had no meaning, and that the public reading of the words, without reference to sense, was an act of piety.

After the chapter, my father read one of Henry Thornton's Family Prayers, replaced in later years by those of Ashton Oxenden.

While we were still very young children, we were carefully incited to acts of practical charity. We began by carrying dinners to the sick and aged poor; then we went on to reading hymns and bits of Bible to the blind and unlettered. As soon as we were old enough, we became teachers in Sunday schools, and conducted cla.s.ses and cottage-meetings. From the very beginning we were taught to save up our money for good causes. Each of us had a "missionary box," and I remember another box, in the counterfeit presentment of a Gothic church, which received contributions for the Church Pastoral Aid Society. When, on an occasion of rare dissipation, I won some s.h.i.+llings at "The Race-Game," they were impounded for the service of the C.M.S., and an aunt of mine, making her sole excursion into melody, wrote for the benefit of her young friends:

"Would you like to be told the best use for a penny?

I can tell you a use which is better than any-- Not on toys or on fruit or on sweetmeats to spend it, But over the seas to the heathen to send it."

I learned my religion from my mother, the sweetest, brightest, and most persuasive of teachers, and what she taught I received as gospel.

"Oh that those lips had language! Life has past With me but roughly since I heard thee last."

_Sit anima mea c.u.m Sanctis._ May my lot be with those Evangelical saints from whom I first learned that, in the supreme work of salvation, no human being and no created thing can interpose between the soul and the Creator. Happy is the man whose religious life has been built on the impregnable rock of that belief.

So much for the foundation. The superstructure was rather accidental than designed.

From my very earliest days I had a natural love of pomp and pageantry; and, though I never saw them, I used to read of them with delight in books of continental travel, and try to depict them in my sketch-books, and even enact them with my toys. Then came Sir Walter Scott, who inspired me, as he inspired so many greater men, with the love of ecclesiastical splendour, and so turned my vague love of ceremony into a definite channel. Another contribution to the same end was made, all unwittingly, by my dear and deeply Protestant father. He was an enthusiast for Gothic architecture, and it was natural to enquire the uses of such things as piscinas and sedilia in fabrics which he taught me to admire. And then came the opportune discovery (in an idle moment under a dull sermon) of the Occasional Offices of the Prayer Book. If language meant anything, those Offices meant the sacramental system of the Catholic Church; and the impression derived from the Prayer Book was confirmed by Jeremy Taylor and _The Christian Year_. I was always impatient of the attempt, even when made by the most respectable people, to pervert plain English, and I felt perfect confidence in building the Catholic superstructure on my Evangelical foundation.

As soon as I had turned fourteen, I was confirmed by the Bishop of Ely (Harold Browne), and made my first Communion in Woburn Church on Easter Day, April 21, 1867.

After the Easter Recess, I went with my parents to London, then seething with excitement over the Tory Reform Bill, which created Household Suffrage in towns. My father, being Sergeant-at-Arms, could give me a seat under the Gallery whenever he chose, and I heard some of the most memorable debates in that great controversy. In the previous year my uncle, Lord Russell, with Mr. Gladstone as Leader of the House of Commons, had been beaten in an attempt to lower the franchise; but the contest had left me cold. The debates of 1867 awoke quite a fresh interest in me. I began to understand the Democratic, as against the Whig, ideal; and I was tremendously impressed by Disraeli, who seemed to tower by a head and shoulders above everyone in the House. Gladstone played a secondary and ambiguous part; and, if I heard him speak, which I doubt, the speech left no dint in my memory.

At this point of the narrative it is necessary to make a pa.s.sing allusion to Doctors, who, far more than Premiers or Priests or any other cla.s.s of men, have determined the course and condition of my life. I believe that I know, by personal experience, more about Doctors and Doctoring than any other man of my age in England. I am, in my own person, a monument of medical practice, and have not only seen, but felt, the rise and fall of several systems of physic and surgery. To have experienced the art is also to have known the artist; and the portraits of all the pract.i.tioners with whom at one time or another I have been brought into intimate relations would fill the largest alb.u.m, and go some way towards furnis.h.i.+ng a modest Picture-Gallery. Broadly speaking, the Doctors of the 'fifties and 'sixties were as d.i.c.kens drew them. The famous consultant, Dr. Parker Peps; the fas.h.i.+onable physician, Sir Tumley Snuffim; the General Pract.i.tioner, Mr. Pilkins; and the Medical Officer of the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Insurance Company, Dr. Jobling; are in the highest degree representative and typical; but perhaps the Doctor--his name, unfortunately, has perished--who was called to the bedside of little Nell, and came with "a great bunch of seals dangling below a waistcoat of ribbed black satin,"

is the most carefully finished portrait. Such, exactly, were the Family Physicians of my youth. They always dressed in s.h.i.+ny black,--trousers, neckcloth, and all; they were invariably bald, and had shaved upper lips and chins, and carefully-trimmed whiskers. They said "Hah!" and "Hum!"

in tones of omniscience which would have converted a Christian Scientist; and, when feeling one's pulse, they produced the largest and most audibly-ticking gold watches producible by the horologist's art.

They had what were called "the courtly manners of the old school"; were diffuse in style, and abounded in periphrasis. Thus they spoke of "the gastric organ" where their successors talk of the stomach, and referred to brandy as "the domestic stimulant." When attending families where religion was held in honour, they were apt to say to the lady of the house, "We are fearfully and wonderfully made"; and, where cla.s.sical culture prevailed, they not infrequently remarked--

Crescit indulgens sibi dirus hydrops.

By the way, my reference to "the domestic stimulant" reminds me that on stimulants, domestic and other, this school of Physicians relied with an unalterable confidence. For a delicate child, a gla.s.s of port wine at 11 was the inevitable prescription, and a tea-spoonful of bark was often added to this generous tonic. In all forms of languor and debility and enfeebled circulation, brandy-and-water was "exhibited," as the phrase went; and, if the dose was not immediately successful, the brandy was increased. I myself, when a sickly boy of twelve, was ordered by a well-known pract.i.tioner, called F. C. Skey, to drink mulled claret at bedtime; and my recollection is that, as a nightcap, it beat bromide and sulphonal hollow. In the light of more recent science, I suppose that all this alcoholic treatment was what Milton calls "the sweet poyson of misused wine," and wrought havoc with one's nerves, digestion, and circulation. It certainly had this single advantage, that when one grew to man's estate, and pa.s.sed from "that poor creature, small beer," to the loaded port and fiery sherry of a "Wine" at the University, it was impossible to make one drunk. And thereby hangs a tale. I was once writing the same sentiment in the same words for a medical journal, and the compositor subst.i.tuted "disadvantage" for "advantage," apparently thinking that my early regimen had deprived me of a real happiness in after-life.

Such were the Doctors of my youth. By no sudden wrench, no violent transition, but gently, gradually, imperceptibly, the type has transformed itself into that which we behold to-day. No doubt an inward continuity has been maintained, but the visible phenomena are so radically altered as to suggest to the superficial observer the idea of a new creation; and even we, who, as Matthew Arnold said, "stand by the Sea of Time, and listen to the solemn and rhythmical beat of its waves,"

even we can scarcely point with confidence to the date of each successive change. First, as to personal appearance. When did doctors abandon black cloth, and betake themselves (like Newman, when he seceded to the Church of Rome) to grey trousers? Not, I feel pretty sure, till the 'seventies were well advanced. Quite certainly the first time that I ever fell into the hands of a moustached Doctor was in 1877. Everyone condemned the hirsute appendage as highly unprofessional, and when, soon after, the poor man found his way into a Lunatic Asylum, the neighbouring Doctors of the older school said that they were not surprised; that "there was a bad family history"; and that he himself had shown marked signs of eccentricity. That meant the moustache, and nothing else. Then, again, when was it first recognized as possible to take a pulse without the a.s.sistance of a gold chronometer? History is silent; but I am inclined to a.s.sign that discovery to the same date as the clinical thermometer, a toy unknown to the Doctors of my youth, who, indeed, were disposed to regard even the stethoscope as new-fangled.

Then "the courtly manners of the old school"--when did they go out? I do not mean to cast the slightest aspersion on the manners of my present doctor, who is as polite and gentlemanlike a young fellow as one could wish to meet. But his manners are not "courtly," nor the least "of the old school." He does not bow when he enters my room, but shakes hands and says it's an A1 day and I had better get out in the motor. Whatever the symptoms presented to his observation, he never says "Hah!" or "Hum!" and he has never once quoted the Bible or Horace, though I have reason to believe that he has read both. Then, again, as a mere matter of style, when did Doctors abandon the majestic "We," which formerly they shared with Kings and Editors? "We shall be all the better when we have had our luncheon and a gla.s.s of sherry," said Sir Tumley Snuffim.

"We will continue the bark and linseed," murmured Dr. Parker Peps, as he bowed himself out. My Doctor says, "Do you feel as if you could manage a chop? It would do you pounds of good"; and "I know the peroxide dressing is rather beastly, but I'd stick it another day or two, if I were you." Medical conversation, too, is an art which has greatly changed. In old days it was thought an excellent method of lubricating the first interview for the Doctor to ask where one's home was, and to state, quite irrespective of the fact, that he was born in the same neighbourhood; having ascertained that one was, say, a Yorks.h.i.+reman, to remark that he would have known it from one's accent; to enlarge on his own connexions, especially if of the territorial caste; to describe his early travels in the South of Europe or the United States; and to discourse on water-colour drawing or the flute. "We doctors, too, have our hobbies; though, alas! the demands of a profession in which _Ne otium quidem otiosum est_ leave us little time to enjoy them."

Quite different is the conversation of the modern doctor. He does not lubricate the interview, but goes straight to business--enquires, examines, p.r.o.nounces, prescribes--and then, if any time is left for light discourse, discusses the rival merits of "Rugger" and "Soccer,"

speculates on the result of the Hospital Cup Tie, or observes that the British Thoroughbred is not deteriorating when he can win with so much on his back; p.r.o.nounces that the Opera last night was ripping, or that some much-praised play is undiluted rot. Not thus did Dr. Parker Peps regale Mrs. Dombey, or Sir Tumley Snuffim soothe the shattered nerves of Mrs. Wit.i.tterly. The reaction against alcoholic treatment can, I believe, be definitely dated from the 10th of January, 1872, when the heads of the medical profession published their opinion that "alcohol, in whatever form, should be prescribed with as much care as any powerful drug, and the directions for its use should be so framed as not to be interpreted as a sanction for excess." This was a heavy blow and deep discouragement to the school of Snuffim and Pilkins, and the system of port at 11, and "the domestic stimulant" between whiles, died hard.